The Fault in Our Stars - Cophine Version
by cosima-hothaus
Summary: Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has brought her a few years, Delphine's never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Cosima Niehaus suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group Delphine's story is about to be completely rewritten. Based on the book The Fault in our Stars by John Green.
1. Chapter 1

**So, I've been wanting to do this for a while and who knows if it's good because I made it while crying for last episode.**

**Here, Delphine's Hazel and Cosima's Augustus. Hope you don't mind. I just think Cosima is a lot like him and Delphine's more like her.**

* * *

Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.

Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying. (Cancer is also a side effect of dying. Almost everything is, really.) But my mom believed I required treatment, so she took me to see my Regular Doctor Jim, who agreed that I was veritably swimming in a paralyzing and totally clinical depression, and that therefore my meds should be adjusted and also I should attend a weekly Support Group.

This Support Group featured a rotating cast of characters in various states of tumor-driven unwellness. Why did the cast rotate? A side effect of dying.

The Support Group, of course, was depressing as hell. It met every Wednesday in the basement of a stonewalled Episcopal church shaped like a cross. We all sat in a circle right in the middle of the cross, where the two boards would have met, where the heart of Jesus would have been.

I noticed this because Art, the Support Group Leader and only person over eighteen in the room, talked about the heart of Jesus every freaking meeting, all about how we, as young cancer survivors, were sitting right in Christ's very sacred heart and whatever.

So here's how it went in God's heart: the six or seven or ten of us walked or wheeled in, grazed at a decrepit selection of cookies and lemonade, sat down in the Circle of Trust, and listened to Art recount for the thousandth time his depressingly miserable life story —how he had cancer in his balls and they thought he was going to die but he didn't die and now here he is, a full-grown adult in a church basement in the 8th nicest city in America, divorced, addicted to video games, mostly friendless, eking out a meager living by exploiting his cancertastic past, slowly working his way toward a master's degree that will not improve his career prospects, waiting, as we all do, for the sword of Damocles to give him the relief that he escaped well those many years ago when cancer took both of his nuts but spared what only the most generous soul would call his life.

AND YOU TOO MIGHT BE SO LUCKY!

Then we introduced ourselves: name. Age. Diagnosis. And how we're doing today. I'm Delphine, I'd say when they'd get to me. Sixteen. Thyroid originally but with an impressive and long-settled satellite colony in my lungs. And I'm doing okay.

Once we got around the circle, Art always asked if anyone wanted to share. And then began the circle jerk of support: everyone talking about fighting and battling and winning and shrinking and scanning. To be fair to Art, he let us talk about dying, too. But most of them weren't dying. Most would live into adulthood, as Art had.

(Which meant there was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the room. Like, I realize that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that's one in five... so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards.)

The only redeeming facet of Support Group was this kid named Scott, a round-faced guy with straight brown hair swept over one eye.

And his eyes were the problem. He had some fantastically improbable eye cancer. One eye had been cut out when he was a kid, and now he wore the kind of thick glasses that made his eyes (both the real one and the glass one) preternaturally huge, like his whole head was basically just this fake eye and this real eye staring at you. From what I could gather on the rare occasions when Scott shared with the group, a recurrence had placed his remaining eye in mortal peril.

Scott and I communicated almost exclusively through sighs. Each time someone discussed anticancer diets or snorting ground-up shark fin or whatever, he'd glance over at me and sigh ever so slightly. I'd shake my head microscopically and exhale in response.

* * *

So Support Group blew, and after a few weeks, I grew to be rather kicking-and-screaming about the whole affair. In fact, on the Wednesday I made the acquaintance of Cosima Niehaus, I tried my level best to get out of Support Group while sitting on the couch with my mom in the third leg of a twelve-hour marathon of the previous season's America's Next Top Model, which admittedly I had already seen, but still.

Me: "I refuse to attend Support Group."

Mom: "One of the symptoms of depression is disinterest in activities."

Me: "Please just let me watch America's Next Top Model. It's an activity."

Mom: "Television is a passivity."

Me: "Ugh, Mom, please."

Mom: "Delphine, you're a teenager. You're not a little kid anymore. You need to make friends, get out of the house, and live your life."

Me: "If you want me to be a teenager, don't send me to Support Group. Buy me a fake ID so I can go to clubs, drink vodka, and take pot."

Mom: "You don't _take_ pot, for starters."

Me: "See, that's the kind of thing I'd know if you got me a fake ID."

Mom: "You're going to Support Group."

Me: "UGGGGGGGGGGGGG."

Mom: "Delphine, you deserve a life."

That shut me up, although I failed to see how attendance at Support Group met the definition of life. Still, I agreed to go —after negotiating the right to record the 1.5 episodes of ANTM I'd be missing.

I went to Support Group for the same reason that I'd once allowed nurses with a mere eighteen months of graduate education to poison me with exotically named chemicals: I wanted to make my parents happy. There is only one thing in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you're sixteen, and that one thing is having a kid who bites it from cancer.

* * *

Mom pulled into the circular driveway behind the church at 4:56. I pretended to fiddle with my oxygen tank for a second just to kill time.

"Do you want me to carry it in for you?"

"No, it's fine," I said. The cylindrical green tank only weighed a few pounds, and I had this little steel cart to wheel it around behind me.

It delivered two liters of oxygen to me each minute through a cannula, a transparent tube that split just beneath my neck, wrapped behind my ears, and then reunited in my nostrils. The contraption was necessary because my lungs sucked at being lungs.

"I love you," she said as I got out.

"You too, Mom. See you at six."

"Make friends!" she said through the rolled-down window as I walked away.

I didn't want to take the elevator because taking the elevator is a Last Days kind of activity at Support Group, so I took the stairs. I grabbed a cookie and poured some lemonade into a Dixie cup and then turned around.

A girl was staring at me.

I was quite sure I'd never seen her before. Short and tiny, she was dwarfed by the molded plastic elementary school chair she was sitting in. Black hair, long and in dreads. She looked my age, maybe a year older, and she sat with her tailbone against the edge of the chair, her posture aggressively poor, one hand half in a pocket of dark purple jeans.

I looked away, suddenly conscious of my myriad insufficiencies. I was wearing old jeans, which had once been tight but now sagged in weird places, and a yellow T-shirt advertising a band I didn't even like anymore. Also my hair: I had this pageboy haircut and curly hair, and I hadn't even bothered to, like, brush it. Furthermore, I had ridiculously fat chipmunked cheeks, a side effect of treatment. I looked like a normally proportioned person with a balloon for a head. That was not even to mention the cankle situation. And yet —I cut a glance to her, and her eyes were still on me.

It occurred to me why they call it eye contact.

I walked into the circle and sat down next to Scott, two seats away from the girl. I glanced again. She was still watching me.

Look, let me just say it: she was hot. A non-hot girl stares at you relentlessly and it is, at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot girl... well.

I pulled out my phone and clicked it so it would display the time: 4:59. The circle filled in with the unlucky twelve-to-eighteens, and then Art started us out with the serenity prayer: _God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference_. The girl was still staring at me. I felt rather blushy.

Finally, I decided that the proper strategy was to stare back. So I looked her over as Art acknowledged for the thousandth time his ball-lessness etc., and soon it was a staring contest. After a while, the girl smiled, and then finally her brown eyes glanced away. When she looked back at me, I flicked my eyebrows up to say, I win.

She shrugged. Art continued and then finally it was time for the introductions. "Scott, perhaps you'd like to go first today. I know you're facing a challenging time."

"Yeah," Scott said. "I'm Scott. I'm seventeen. And it's looking like I have to get surgery in a couple weeks, after which I'll be blind. Not to complain or anything because I know a lot of us have it worse, but yeah, I mean, being blind does sort of suck. My girlfriend helps, though. And friends like Cosima." He nodded toward the girl, who now had a name. "So, yeah," Scott continued. He was looking at his hands, which he'd folded into each other like the top of a tepee. "There's nothing you can do about it."

"We're here for you, Scott," Art said. "Let Scott hear it, guys." And then we all, in a monotone, said, "We're here for you, Scott."

Tony was next. He was twelve. He had leukemia. He'd always had leukemia. He was okay. (Or so he said. He'd taken the elevator.)

Aynsley was sixteen, and pretty enough to be the object of the hot girl's eye. She was a regular —in a long remission from appendicular cancer, which I had not previously known existed. She said —as she had every other time I'd attended Support Group— that she felt strong, which felt like bragging to me as the oxygen-drizzling nubs tickled my nostrils.

There were five others before they got to her. She smiled a little when her turn came. Her voice was low, smoky, and dead sexy. "My name is Cosima Niehaus," she said. "I'm seventeen. I had a little touch of osteosarcoma about a year and a half ago, but I'm just here today at Scott's request."

"And how are you feeling?" asked Art.

"Oh, I'm grand." Cosima Niehaus smiled with a corner of her mouth. "I'm on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend."

When it was my turn, I said, "My name is Delphine. I'm sixteen. Thyroid with mets in my lungs. I'm okay."

The hour proceeded apace: fights were recounted, battles won amid wars sure to be lost; hope was clung to; families were both celebrated and denounced; it was agreed that friends just didn't get it; tears were shed; comfort proffered. Neither Cosima Niehaus nor I spoke again until Art said, "Cosima, perhaps you'd like to share your fears with the group."

"My fears?"

"Yes."

"I fear oblivion," she said without a moment's pause. "I fear it like the proverbial blind man who's afraid of the dark."

"Too soon," Scott said, cracking a smile.

"Was that insensitive?" Cosima asked. "I can be pretty blind to other people's feelings."

Scott was laughing, but Art raised a chastening finger and said, "Cosima, please. Let's return to you and your struggles. You said you fear oblivion?"

"I did," Cosima answered.

Art seemed lost. "Would, uh, would anyone like to speak to that?"

I hadn't been in proper school in three years. My parents were my two best friends. My third best friend was an author who did not know I existed. I was a fairly shy person —not the hand-raising type.

And yet, just this once, I decided to speak. I half raised my hand and Art, his delight evident, immediately said, "Delphine!" I was, I'm sure he assumed, opening up. Becoming Part of The Group.

I looked over at Cosima Niehaus, who looked back at me. You could almost see through her eyes, they were so brown.

"There will come a time," I said, "when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this"—I gestured encompassingly—"will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that's what everyone else does."

I'd learned this from my aforementioned third best friend, Aldous Leekie, the reclusive author of An Imperial Affliction, the book that was as close a thing as I had to a Bible. Aldous Leekie was the only person I'd ever come across who seemed to (a) understand what it's like to be dying, and (b) not have died.

After I finished, there was quite a long period of silence as I watched a smile spread all the way across Cosima's face —not the little crooked smile of the girl trying to be sexy while she stared at me, but her real smile, too big for her face. "Goddamn," Cosima said quietly. "Aren't you something else."

Neither of us said anything for the rest of Support Group. At the end, we all had to hold hands, and Art led us in a prayer.

"Lord Jesus Christ, we are gathered here in Your heart, literally in Your heart, as cancer survivors. You and You alone know us as we know ourselves. Guide us to life and the Light through our times of trial. We pray for Scott's eyes, for Tony's and Cal's blood, for Cosima's bones, for Delphine's lungs, for Victor's throat. We pray that You might heal us and that we might feel Your love, and Your peace, which passes all understanding. And we remember in our hearts those whom we knew and loved who have gone home to you: Maria and Kade and Joseph and Haley and Abigail and Angelina and Taylor and Gabriel and..."

It was a long list. The world contains a lot of dead people. And while Art droned on, reading the list from a sheet of paper because it was too long to memorize, I kept my eyes closed, trying to think prayerfully but mostly imagining the day when my name would find its way onto that list, all the way at the end when everyone had stopped listening.

When Art was finished, we said this stupid mantra together —LIVING OUR BEST LIFE TODAY— and it was over. Cosima Niehaus pushed herself out of her chair and walked over to me. Her gait was crooked like her smile. She towered over me, but she kept her distance so I wouldn't have to crouch my neck to look her in the eye. "What's your name?" she asked.

"Delphine."

"No, your full name."

"Um, Delphine Cormier." She was just about to say something else when Scott walked up. "Hold on," Cosima said, raising a finger, and turned to Scott. "That was actually worse than you made it out to be."

"I told you it was bleak."

"Why do you bother with it?"

"I don't know. It kind of helps?"

Cosima leaned in so she thought I couldn't hear. "She's a regular?" I couldn't hear Scott's comment, but Cosima responded, "I'll say."

She clasped Scott by both shoulders and then took a half step away from him. "Tell Delphine about clinic."

Scott leaned a hand against the snack table and focused his huge eye on me. "Okay, so I went into clinic this morning, and I was telling my surgeon that I'd rather be deaf than blind. And he said, 'It doesn't work that way,' and I was, like, 'Yeah, I realize it doesn't work that way; I'm just saying I'd rather be deaf than blind if I had the choice, which I realize I don't have,' and he said, 'Well, the good news is that you won't be deaf,' and I was like, 'Thank you for explaining that my eye cancer isn't going to make me deaf. I feel so fortunate that an intellectual giant like yourself would deign to operate on me."

"He sounds like a winner," I said. "I'm gonna try to get me some eye cancer just so I can make this guy's acquaintance."

"Good luck with that. All right, I should go. Marian's waiting for me. I gotta look at her a lot while I can."

"Counterinsurgence tomorrow?" Cosima asked.

"Definitely." Scott turned and ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time.

Cosima Niehaus turned to me. "Literally," she said.

"Literally?" I asked.

"We are literally in the heart of Jesus," she said. "I thought we were in a church basement, but we are literally in the heart of Jesus."

"Someone should tell Jesus," I said. "I mean, it's gotta be dangerous, storing children with cancer in your heart."

"I would tell Him myself," Cosima said, "but unfortunately I am literally stuck inside of His heart, so He won't be able to hear me." I laughed. She shook her head, just looking at me.

"What?" I asked.

"Nothing," she said.

"Why are you looking at me like that?"

Cosima half smiled. "Because you're beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence." A brief awkward silence ensued. Cosima plowed through: "I mean, particularly given that, as you so deliciously pointed out, all of this will end in oblivion and everything."

I kind of scoffed or sighed or exhaled in a way that was vaguely coughy and then said, "I'm not beau—"

"You're like a millennial Natalie Portman. Like V for Vendetta Natalie Portman."

"Never seen it," I said.

"Really?" she asked. "Pixie-haired gorgeous girl dislikes authority and can't help but fall for a boy she knows is trouble. It's your autobiography if we change gender, as far as I can tell."

Her every syllable flirted. Honestly, she kind of turned me on. I didn't even know that girls could turn me on —not, like, in real life.

A younger girl walked past us. "How's it going, Helena?" she asked. She smiled and mumbled, "Hi, Cosima."

"Memorial people," she explained. Memorial was the big research hospital. "Where do you go?"

"Children's," I said, my voice smaller than I expected it to be. She nodded. The conversation seemed over. "Well," I said, nodding vaguely toward the steps that led us out of the Literal Heart of Jesus. I tilted my cart onto its wheels and started walking. She limped beside me. "So, see you next time, maybe?" I asked.

"You should see it," she said. "V for Vendetta, I mean."

"Okay," I said. "I'll look it up."

"No. With me. At my house," she said. "Now."

I stopped walking. "I hardly know you, Cosima Niehaus. You could be an axe murderer."

She nodded. "True enough, Delphine Cormier." She walked past me, her shoulders coming out of her grey lace top, her back straight, her steps lilting just slightly to the right as she walked steady and confident on what I had determined was a prosthetic leg. Osteosarcoma sometimes takes a limb or two to check you out. Then, if it likes you, it takes the rest.

I followed her upstairs, losing ground as I made my way up slowly, stairs not being a field of expertise for my lungs. And then we were out of Jesus' heart and in the parking lot, the spring air just on the cold side of perfect, the late-afternoon light heavenly in its hurtfulness.

Mom wasn't there yet, which was unusual, because Mom was almost always waiting for me. I glanced around and saw that a tall, curvy brunette girl had Scott pinned against the stone wall of the church, kissing him rather aggressively. They were close enough to me that I could hear the weird noises of their mouths together, and I could hear him saying, "Always," and her saying, "Always," in return.

Suddenly standing next to me, Cosima half whispered, "They're big believers in PDA."

"What's with the 'always'?" The slurping sounds intensified.

"Always is their thing. They'll always love each other and whatever. I would conservatively estimate they have texted each other the word 'always' four million times in the last year."

A couple more cars drove up, taking Tony and Helena away. It was just Cosima and me now, watching Scott and Marian, who proceeded apace as if they were not leaning against a place of worship. His hand reached for her boob over her shirt and pawed at it, his palm still while his fingers moved around. I wondered if that felt good. Didn't seem like it would, but I decided to forgive Scott on the grounds that he was going blind. The senses must feast while there is yet hunger and whatever.

"Imagine taking that last drive to the hospital," I said quietly. "The last time you'll ever drive a car."

Without looking over at me, Cosima said, "You're killing my vibe here, Delphine Cormier. I'm trying to observe young love in its many splendored awkwardness."

"I think he's hurting her boob," I said.

"Yes, it's difficult to ascertain whether he is trying to arouse her or perform a breast exam." Then Cosima Niehaus reached into a pocket and pulled out, of all things, a pack of cigarettes. She flipped it open and put a cigarette between her lips.

"Are you serious?" I asked. "You think that's cool? Oh, my God, you just ruined the whole thing."

"Which whole thing?" she asked, turning to me. The cigarette dangled unlit from the unsmiling corner of her mouth.

"The whole thing where a girl who is not unattractive or unintelligent or seemingly in any way unacceptable stares at me and points out incorrect uses of literality and compares me to actresses and asks me to watch a movie at her house. But of course, there is always a hamartia and yours is that oh, my God, even though you HAD FREAKING CANCER you give money to a company in exchange for the chance to acquire YET MORE CANCER. Oh, my God. Let me just assure you that not being able to breathe SUCKS. Totally disappointing. Totally."

"A hamartia?" she asked, the cigarette still in her mouth. It tightened her jaw. She had a hell of a jawline, unfortunately.

"A fatal flaw," I explained, turning away from her. I stepped toward the curb, leaving Cosima Niehaus behind me, and then I heard a car start down the street. It was Mom. She'd been waiting for me to, like, make friends or whatever.

I felt this weird mix of disappointment and anger welling up inside of me. I don't even know what the feeling was, really, just that there was a lot of it, and I wanted to smack Cosima Niehaus and also replace my lungs with lungs that didn't suck at being lungs. I was standing with my Chuck Taylors on the very edge of the curb, the oxygen tank ball-and-chaining in the cart by my side, and right as my mom pulled up, I felt a hand grab mine.

I yanked my hand free but turned back to her.

"They don't kill you unless you light them," she said as Mom arrived at the curb. "And I've never lit one. It's a metaphor, see: you put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don't give it the power to do its killing."

"It's a metaphor," I said, dubious. Mom was just idling.

"It's a metaphor," she said.

"You choose your behaviors based on their metaphorical resonances..." I said.

"Oh, yes." She smiled. The big, goofy, real smile. "I'm a big believer in metaphor, Delphine Cormier."

I turned to the car. Tapped the window. It rolled down. "I'm going to a movie with Cosima Niehaus," I said. "Please record the next several episodes of the ANTM marathon for me."

* * *

**Hope you liked it.**

**Disclaimer: I don't own either Orphan Black or The Fault in our Stars. They are property of John Green and BBC America.**


	2. Chapter 2

**So, thanks for the response last chapter. It was awesome. Enjoy!**

* * *

Cosima Niehaus drove horrifically. Whether stopping or starting, everything happened with a tremendous JOLT. I flew against the seatbelt of her Toyota SUV each time she braked, and my neck snapped backward each time she hit the gas. I might have been nervous —what with sitting in the car of a strange girl on the way to her house, keenly aware that my crap lungs complicated efforts to fend off unwanted advances— but her driving was so astonishingly poor that I could think of nothing else.

We'd gone perhaps a mile in jagged silence before Cosima said, "I failed the driving test three times."

"You don't say."

She laughed, nodding. "Well, I can't feel pressure in old Prosty, and I can't get the hang of driving left-footed. My doctors say most amputees can drive with no problem, but... yeah. Not me. Anyway, I go in for my fourth driving test, and it goes about like this is going."

A half mile in front of us, a light turned red. Cosima slammed on the brakes, tossing me into the triangular embrace of the seat belt. "Sorry. I swear to God I am trying to be gentle. Right, so anyway, at the end of the test, I totally thought I'd failed again, but the instructor was like, 'Your driving is unpleasant, but it isn't technically unsafe.'"

"I'm not sure I agree," I said. "I suspect Cancer Perk." Cancer Perks are the little things cancer kids get that regular kids don't: basketballs signed by sports heroes, free passes on late homework, unearned driver's licenses, etc.

"Yeah," she said. The light turned green. I braced myself. Cosima slammed the gas.

"You know they've got hand controls for people who can't use their legs," I pointed out.

"Yeah," she said. "Maybe someday." She sighed in a way that made me wonder whether she was confident about the existence of someday. I knew osteosarcoma was highly curable, but still.

There are a number of ways to establish someone's approximate survival expectations without actually asking. I used the classic: "So, are you in school?" Generally, your parents pull you out of school at some point if they expect you to bite it.

"Yeah," she said. "I'm at North Central. A year behind, though: I'm a sophomore. You?"

I considered lying. No one likes a corpse, after all. But in the end I told the truth. "No, my parents withdrew me three years ago."

"Three years?" She asked, astonished.

I told Cosima the broad outline of my miracle: diagnosed with Stage IV thyroid cancer when I was thirteen. (I didn't tell her that the diagnosis came three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! You're a woman. Now die.) It was, we were told, incurable. I had a surgery called radical neck dissection, which is about as pleasant as it sounds. Then radiation. Then they tried some chemo for my lung tumors. The tumors shrank, then grew. By then, I was fourteen. My lungs started to fill up with water. I was looking pretty dead —my hands and feet ballooned; my skin cracked; my lips were perpetually blue.

They've got this drug that makes you not feel so completely terrified about the fact that you can't breathe, and I had a lot of it flowing into me through a PICC line, and more than a dozen other drugs besides. But even so, there's a certain unpleasantness to drowning, particularly when it occurs over the course of several months.

I finally ended up in the ICU with pneumonia, and my mom knelt by the side of my bed and said, "Are you ready, sweetie?" and I told her I was ready, and my dad just kept telling me he loved me in this voice that was not breaking so much as already broken, and I kept telling him that I loved him, too, and everyone was holding hands, and I couldn't catch my breath, and my lungs were acting desperate, gasping, pulling me out of the bed trying to find a position that could get them air, and I was embarrassed by their desperation, disgusted that they wouldn't just let go, and I remember my mom telling me it was okay, that I was okay, that I would be okay, and my father was trying so hard not to sob that when he did, which was regularly, it was an earthquake. And I remember wanting not to be awake.

Everyone figured I was finished, but my Cancer Doctor Ethan managed to get some of the fluid out of my lungs, and shortly thereafter the antibiotics they'd given me for the pneumonia kicked in.

I woke up and soon got into one of those experimental trials that are famous in the Republic of Cancervania for Not Working. The drug was Phalanxifor, this molecule designed to attach itself to cancer cells and slow their growth. It didn't work in about 70 percent of people. But it worked in me. The tumors shrank.

And they stayed shrunk. _Huzzah, Phalanxifor! _In the past eighteen months, my mets have hardly grown, leaving me with lungs that suck at being lungs but could, conceivably, struggle along indefinitely with the assistance of drizzled oxygen and daily Phalanxifor.

Admittedly, my Cancer Miracle had only resulted in a bit of purchased time. (I did not yet know the size of the bit.) But when telling Cosima Niehaus, I painted the rosiest possible picture, embellishing the miraculousness of the miracle.

"So now you gotta go back to school," she said.

"I actually can't," I explained, "because I already got my GED. So I'm taking classes at MCC," which was our community college.

"A college girl," she said, nodding. "That explains the aura of sophistication." She smirked at me. I shoved her upper arm playfully. I could feel the muscle right beneath the skin, all tensed and amazing.

We made a wheels-screeching turn into a subdivision with eight-foot-high stucco walls. Her house was the first one on the left. A two-story colonial. We jerked to a halt in her driveway.

I followed her inside. A wooden plaque in the entryway was engraved in cursive with the words Home Is Where the Heart Is, and the entire house turned out to be festooned in such observations. Good Friends Are Hard to Find and Impossible to Forget read an illustration above the coatrack. True Love Is Born from Hard Times promised a needlepointed pillow in their antique-furnished living room. Cosima saw me reading. "My parents call them Encouragements," she explained. "They're everywhere."

Her mom and dad called her Cos. They were making enchiladas in the kitchen (a piece of stained glass by the sink read in bubbly letters Family Is Forever). Her mom was putting chicken into tortillas, which her dad then rolled up and placed in a glass pan. They didn't seem too surprised by my arrival, which made sense: the fact that Cosima made me feel special did not necessarily indicate that I was special. Maybe she brought home a different girl every night to show her movies and feel her up.

"This is Delphine Cormier," she said, by way of introduction.

"Just Delphine," I said.

"How's it going, Delphine?" asked Cos' dad. He was tall —probably one head taller than Cos— and skinny in a way that parentally aged people usually aren't.

"Okay," I said.

"How was Scott's Support Group?"

"It was incredible," Cos said.

"You're such a Debbie Downer," her mom said. "Delphine, do you enjoy it?"

I paused a second, trying to figure out if my response should be calibrated to please Cosima or her parents. "Most of the people are really nice," I finally said.

"That's exactly what we found with families at Memorial when we were in the thick of it with Cos' treatment," her dad said. "Everybody was so kind. Strong, too. In the darkest days, the Lord puts the best people into your life."

"Quick, give me a throw pillow and some thread because that needs to be an Encouragement," Cosima said, and her dad looked a little annoyed, but then Cos wrapped her short arm around her dad's neck and said, "I'm just kidding, Dad. I like the freaking Encouragements. I really do. I just can't admit it because I'm a teenager." Her dad rolled his eyes.

"You're joining us for dinner, I hope?" asked her mom. She was small, brunette, and vaguely mousy.

"I guess?" I said. "I have to be home by ten. Also I don't, um, eat meat?"

"No problem. We'll vegetarianize some," she said.

"Animals are just too cute?" Cos asked.

"I want to minimize the number of deaths I am responsible for," I said. Cos opened her mouth to respond but then stopped herself.

Her mom filled the silence. "Well, I think that's wonderful."

They talked to me for a bit about how the enchiladas were Famous Niehaus Enchiladas and Not to Be Missed and about how Cos' curfew was also ten, and how they were inherently distrustful of anyone who gave their kids curfews other than ten, and was I in school —"she's a college student," Cosima interjected— and how the weather was truly and absolutely extraordinary for March, and how in spring all things are new, and they didn't even once ask me about the oxygen or my diagnosis, which was weird and wonderful.

"Delphine and I are going to watch V for Vendetta so she can see her filmic doppelgänger, mid-two thousand's Natalie Portman." Said Cosima.

"The living room TV is yours for the watching," her dad said happily.

"I think we're actually gonna watch it in the basement."

Her dad laughed. "Good try. Living room."

"But I want to show Delphine Cormier the basement," Cosima said.

"Just Delphine," I said.

"So show Just Delphine the basement," said her dad. "And then come upstairs and watch your movie in the living room."

Cosima puffed out her cheeks, balanced on her leg, and twisted her hips, throwing the prosthetic forward. "Fine," she mumbled.

I followed her down carpeted stairs to a huge basement bedroom. A shelf at my eye level reached all the way around the room, and it was stuffed solid with basketball memorabilia: dozens of trophies with gold plastic men mid–jump shot or dribbling or reaching for a layup toward an unseen basket. There were also lots of signed balls and sneakers.

"I used to play basketball," she explained.

"You must've been pretty good."

"I wasn't bad, but all the shoes and balls are Cancer Perks." She walked toward the TV, where a huge pile of DVDs and video games were arranged into a vague pyramid shape.

She bent at the waist and snatched up V for Vendetta.

"I was, like, the prototypical white San Franciscan kid," she said. "I was all about resurrecting the lost art of the midrange jumper, but then one day I was shooting free throws —just standing at the foul line at the North Central gym shooting from a rack of balls. All at once, I couldn't figure out why I was methodically tossing a spherical object through a toroidal object. It seemed like the stupidest thing I could possibly be doing.

"I started thinking about little kids putting a cylindrical peg through a circular hole, and how they do it over and over again for months when they figure it out, and how basketball was basically just a slightly more aerobic version of that same exercise. Anyway, for the longest time, I just kept sinking free throws. I hit eighty in a row, my all-time best, but as I kept going, I felt more and more like a two-year old. And then for some reason I started to think about hurdlers. Are you okay?" She asked, stopping the hand movements she did when she explained things.

I'd taken a seat on the corner of her unmade bed. I wasn't trying to be suggestive or anything; I just got kind of tired when I had to stand a lot. I'd stood in the living room and then there had been the stairs, and then more standing, which was quite a lot of standing for me, and I didn't want to faint or anything. I was a bit of a Victorian Lady, fainting-wise.

"I'm fine," I said. "Just listening. Hurdlers?"

"Yeah, hurdlers. I don't know why. I started thinking about them running their hurdle races, and jumping over these totally arbitrary objects that had been set in their path. And I wondered if hurdlers ever thought, you know, this would go faster if we just got rid of the hurdles."

"This was before your diagnosis?" I asked.

"Right, well, there was that, too." She smiled with half her mouth. "The day of the existentially fraught free throws was coincidentally also my last day of dual leggedness. I had a weekend between when they scheduled the amputation and when it happened. My own little glimpse of what Scott is going through."

I nodded. I liked Cosima Niehaus. I really, really, really liked her. I liked the way her story ended with someone else. I liked her voice. I liked that she took existentially fraught free throws. I liked that she was a tenured professor in the Department of Slightly Crooked Smiles with a dual appointment in the Department of Having a Voice That Made My Skin Feel More Like Skin. And I liked that she had two names. I've always liked people with two names, because you get to make up your mind what you call them: Cos or Cosima? Me, I was always just Delphine, univalent Delphine.

"Do you have siblings?" I asked.

"Huh?" She answered, seeming a little distracted.

"You said that thing about watching kids play."

"Oh, yeah, no. I have nephews, from my half-sisters. But they're older. They're like —DAD, HOW OLD ARE SARAH AND ALISON?"

"Twenty-eight!"

"They're like twenty-eight. Sarah lives in Bristol and isn't married and Alison lives… somewhere in Canada and is married to a very fancy lawyer dude. Or banker dude. I can't remember. You have siblings?" I shook my head no. "So what's your story?" She asked, sitting down next to me at a safe distance.

"I already told you my story. I was diagnosed when—"

"No, not your cancer story. Your story. Interests, hobbies, passions, weird fetishes, etcetera." She adjusted her black thick glasses

"Um," I said.

"Don't tell me you're one of those people who becomes their disease. I know so many people like that. It's disheartening. Like, cancer is in the growth business, right? The taking-people-over business. But surely you haven't let it succeed prematurely."

It occurred to me that perhaps I had. I struggled with how to pitch myself to Cosima Niehaus, which enthusiasms to embrace, and in the silence that followed it occurred to me that I wasn't very interesting. "I am pretty unextraordinary."

"I reject that out of hand. Think of something you like. The first thing that comes to mind," her smile was breathtaking.

"Um. Reading?"

"What do you read?"

"Everything. From, like, hideous romance to pretentious fiction to poetry. Whatever."

"Do you write poetry, too?"

"No. I don't write."

"There!" Cosima almost shouted. "Delphine Cormier, you are the only teenager in America who prefers reading poetry to writing it. This tells me so much. You read a lot of capital-G great books, don't you?"

"I guess?"

"What's your favorite?"

"Um," I said.

My favorite book, by a wide margin, was An Imperial Affliction, but I didn't like to tell people about it. Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. And then there are books like An Imperial Affliction, which you can't tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.

It wasn't even that the book was so good or anything; it was just that the author, Aldous Leekie, seemed to understand me in weird and impossible ways. An Imperial Affliction was my book, in the way my body was my body and my thoughts were my thoughts.

Even so, I told Cosima. "My favorite book is probably An Imperial Affliction," I said.

"Does it feature zombies?" She asked.

"No," I said.

"Stormtroopers?"

I shook my head. "It's not that kind of book."

She smiled. "I am going to read this terrible book with the boring title that does not contain stormtroopers," she promised, and I immediately felt like I shouldn't have told her about it.

Cosima spun around to a stack of books beneath her bedside table. She grabbed a paperback and a pen. As she scribbled an inscription onto the title page, she said, "All I ask in exchange is that you read this brilliant and haunting novelization of my favorite video game." She held up the book, which was called The Price of Dawn. I laughed and took it. Our hands kind of got muddled together in the book handoff, and then she was holding my hand. "Cold," she said, pressing a finger to my pale wrist.

"Not cold so much as underoxygenated," I said.

"I love it when you talk medical to me," she said. She stood, and pulled me up with her, and did not let go of my hand until we reached the stairs.

* * *

We watched the movie with several inches of couch between us. I did the totally middle-schooly thing wherein I put my hand on the couch about halfway between us to let her know that it was okay to hold it, but she didn't try. An hour into the movie, Cosima's parents came in and served us the enchiladas, which we ate on the couch, and they were pretty delicious.

The movie was about this heroic guy in a mask who died heroically for Natalie Portman, who's pretty badass and very hot and does not have anything approaching my puffy steroid face.

As the credits rolled, she said, "Pretty great, huh?"

"Pretty great," I agreed, although it wasn't, really. It was kind of a boy movie. "I should get home. Class in the morning," I said.

I sat on the couch for a while as Cosima searched for her keys. Her mom sat down next to me and said, "I just love this one, don't you?" I guess I had been looking toward the Encouragement above the TV, a drawing of an angel with the caption Without Pain, How Could We Know Joy?

(This is an old argument in the field of Thinking About Suffering, and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries, but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not in any way affect the taste of chocolate.) "Yes," I said. "A lovely thought."

* * *

I drove Cosima's car home with Cosima riding shotgun. She played me a couple songs she liked by a band called The Hectic Glow, and they were good songs, but because I didn't know them already, they weren't as good to me as they were to her. I kept glancing over at her leg, or the place where her leg had been, trying to imagine what the fake leg looked like. I didn't want to care about it, but I did a little. She probably cared about my oxygen. Illness repulses. I'd learned that a long time ago, and I suspected Cosima had, too.

As I pulled up outside of my house, Cosima clicked the radio off. The air thickened. She was probably thinking about kissing me, and I was definitely thinking about kissing her. Wondering if I wanted to. I'd kissed girls, but it had been a while. Pre-Miracle.

I put the car in park and looked over at her. She really was beautiful. I know girls aren't supposed to be, but she was. "Delphine Cormier," she said, my name new and better in her voice. "It has been a real pleasure to make your acquaintance."

"Ditto, Miss. Niehaus," I said. I felt shy looking at her. I could match the intensity of her brown eyes.

"May I see you again?" She asked. There was an endearing nervousness in her voice.

I smiled. "Sure."

"Tomorrow?" She asked.

"Patience, grasshopper," I counseled. "You don't want to seem overeager."

"Right, that's why I said tomorrow," she said. "I want to see you again tonight. But I'm willing to wait all night and much of tomorrow." I rolled my eyes.

"I'm serious," she said.

"You don't even know me," I said. I grabbed the book from the center console. "How about I call you when I finish this?"

"But you don't even have my phone number," she said.

"I strongly suspect you wrote it in the book."

She broke out into that goofy smile. "And you say we don't know each other."

* * *

**One question: who would you like to be Caroline Mathers? Because I just have no idea.**

**Disclaimer: I don't own either Orphan Black or The Fault in our Stars. They are property of John Green and BBC America.**


	3. Chapter 3

I stayed up pretty late that night reading The Price of Dawn. (Spoiler alert: The Price of Dawn is blood.) It wasn't An Imperial Affliction, but the protagonist, Staff Sergeant Max Mayhem, was vaguely likable despite killing, by my count, no fewer than 118 individuals in 284 pages. So I got up late the next morning, a Thursday. Mom's policy was never to wake me up, because one of the job requirements of Professional Sick Person is sleeping a lot, so I was kind of confused at first when I jolted awake with her hands on my shoulders.

"It's almost ten," she said.

"Sleep fights cancer," I said. "I was up late reading."

"It must be some book," she said as she knelt down next to the bed and unscrewed me from my large, rectangular oxygen concentrator, which I called Philip, because it just kind of looked like a Philip.

Mom hooked me up to a portable tank and then reminded me I had class. "Did that girl give it to you?" she asked out of nowhere.

"By it, do you mean herpes?"

"You are too much," Mom said. "The book, Delphine. I mean the book."

"Yeah, she gave me the book."

"I can tell you like her," she said, eyebrows raised, as if this observation required some uniquely maternal instinct. I shrugged. "I told you Support Group would be worth your while."

"Did you just wait outside the entire time?"

"Yes. I brought some paperwork. Anyway, time to face the day, young lady."

"Mom. Sleep. Cancer. Fighting."

"I know, love, but there is class to attend. Also, today is..." the glee in Mom's voice was evident.

"Thursday?"

"Did you seriously forget?"

"Maybe?"

"It's Thursday, March twenty-ninth!" she basically screamed, a demented smile plastered to her face.

"You are really excited about knowing the date!" I yelled back.

"DELPHINE! IT'S YOUR THIRTY-THIRD HALF BIRTHDAY!"

"Ohhhhhh," I said. My mom was really super into celebration maximization. IT'S ARBOR DAY! LET'S HUG TREES AND EAT CAKE!

COLUMBUS BROUGHT SMALLPOX TO THE NATIVES; WE SHALL RECALL THE OCCASION WITH A PICNIC! Etc.

"Well, Happy thirty-third Half Birthday to me," I said.

"What do you want to do on your very special day?"

"Come home from class and set the world record for number of episodes of Top Chef watched consecutively?"

Mom reached up to this shelf above my bed and grabbed Bluie, the blue stuffed bear I'd had since I was, like, one —back when it was socially acceptable to name one's friends after their hue.

"You don't want to go to a movie with Beth or Felix or someone?" who were my friends.

That was an idea. "Sure," I said. "I'll text Beth and see if she wants to go to the mall or something after school." Mom smiled, hugging the bear to her stomach.

"Is it still cool to go to the mall?" she asked.

"I take quite a lot of pride in not knowing what's cool," I answered.

* * *

I texted Beth, took a shower, got dressed, and then Mom drove me to school. My class was American Literature, a lecture about Frederick Douglass in a mostly empty auditorium, and it was incredibly difficult to stay awake. Forty minutes into the ninety-minute class, Beth texted back.

_Awesomesauce. Happy Half Birthday. Castleton at 3:32?_

Beth had the kind of packed social life that needs to be scheduled down to the minute. I responded:

_Sounds good. I'll be at the food court._

* * *

Mom drove me directly from school to the bookstore attached to the mall, where I purchased both Midnight Dawns and Requiem for Mayhem, the first two sequels to The Price of Dawn, and then I walked over to the huge food court and bought a Diet Coke. It was 3:21.

I watched these kids playing in the pirate-ship indoor playground while I read. There was this tunnel that these two kids kept crawling through over and over and they never seemed to get tired, which made me think of Cosima Niehaus and the existentially fraught free throws.

Mom was also in the food court, alone, sitting in a corner where she thought I couldn't see her, eating a cheesesteak sandwich and reading through some papers. Medical stuff, probably. The paperwork was endless.

At 3:32 precisely, I noticed Beth striding confidently past the Wok House. She saw me the moment I raised my hand, flashed her very white and newly straightened teeth at me, and headed over.

She wore a knee-length charcoal coat that fit perfectly and sunglasses that dominated her face. She pushed them up onto the top of her head as she leaned down to hug me.

"Darling," she said, vaguely Canadian. "How are you?" People didn't find the accent odd or off-putting. Beth just happened to be an extremely sophisticated twenty-five-year-old Canadian socialite stuck inside a sixteen-year-old body in San Francisco. Everyone accepted it.

"I'm good. How are you?"

"I don't even know anymore. Is that diet?" I nodded and handed it to her. She sipped through the straw. "I do wish you were at school these days. Some of the students have become downright edible."

"Oh, yeah? Like who?" I asked. She proceeded to name five people we'd attended elementary and middle school with, but I couldn't picture any of them.

"I've been dating Paul Dierden for a bit," she said, "but I don't think it will last. He's such a boy. But enough about me. What is new in the Delphineverse?"

"Nothing, really," I said.

"Health is good?"

"The same, I guess?"

"Phalanxifor!" she enthused, smiling. "So you could just live forever, right?"

"Probably not forever," I said.

"But basically," she said. "What else is new?"

I thought of telling her that I was seeing someone, too, or at least that I'd watched a movie with someone, just because I knew it would surprise and amaze her that anyone as disheveled and awkward and stunted as me could even briefly win the affections of a girl. But I didn't really have much to brag about, so I just shrugged.

"What in heaven is that?" asked Beth, gesturing to the book.

"Oh, it's sci-fi. I've gotten kinda into it. It's a series."

"I am alarmed. Shall we shop?"

We went to this shoe store. As we were shopping, Beth kept picking out all these open-toed flats for me and saying, "These would look cute on you," which reminded me that Beth never wore open-toed shoes on account of how she hated her feet because she felt her second toes were too long, as if the second toe was a window into the soul or something.

So when I pointed out a pair of sandals that would suit her skin tone, she was like, "Yeah, but..." the but being but they will expose my hideous second toes to the public, and I said, "Beth, you're the only person I've ever known to have toe-specific dysmorphia," and she said, "What is that?"

"You know, like when you look in the mirror and the thing you see is not the thing as it really is."

"Oh. Oh," she said. "Do you like these?" She held up a pair of cute but unspectacular Mary Jane's, and I nodded, and she found her size and tried them on, pacing up and down the aisle, watching her feet in the knee-high angled mirrors.

Then she grabbed a pair of strappy hooker shoes and said, "Is it even possible to walk in these? I mean, I would just die—" and then stopped short, looking at me as if to say I'm sorry, as if it were a crime to mention death to the dying.

"You should try them on," Beth continued, trying to paper over the awkwardness.

"I'd sooner die," I assured her.

I ended up just picking out some flip-flops so that I could have something to buy, and then I sat down on one of the benches opposite a bank of shoes and watched Beth snake her way through the aisles, shopping with the kind of intensity and focus that one usually associates with professional chess.

I kind of wanted to take out Midnight Dawns and read for a while, but I knew that'd be rude, so I just watched Beth. Occasionally she'd circle back to me clutching some closed-toe prey and say, "This?" and I would try to make an intelligent comment about the shoe, and then finally she bought three pairs and I bought my flip-flops and then as we exited she said, "Anthropologie?"

"I should head home actually," I said. "I'm kinda tired."

"Sure, of course," she said. "I have to see you more often, darling." She placed her hands on my shoulders, kissed me on both cheeks, and marched off, her narrow hips swishing.

I didn't go home, though. I'd told Mom to pick me up at six, and while I figured she was either in the mall or in the parking lot, I still wanted the next two hours to myself.

I liked my mom, but her perpetual nearness sometimes made me feel weirdly nervous. And I liked Beth, too. I really did. But three years removed from proper full-time schoolic exposure to my peers, I felt a certain unbridgeable distance between us. I think my school friends wanted to help me through my cancer, but they eventually found out that they couldn't. For one thing, there was no through.

So I excused myself on the grounds of pain and fatigue, as I often had over the years when seeing Beth or any of my other friends. In truth, it always hurt. It always hurt not to breathe like a normal person, incessantly reminding your lungs to be lungs, forcing yourself to accept as unsolvable the clawing scraping inside-out ache of underoxygenation. So I wasn't lying, exactly. I was just choosing among truths.

I found a bench surrounded by an Irish Gifts store, the Fountain Pen Emporium, and a baseball-cap outlet —a corner of the mall even Beth would never shop, and started reading Midnight Dawns.

It featured a sentence-to-corpse ratio of nearly 1:1, and I tore through it without ever looking up. I liked Staff Sergeant Max Mayhem, even though he didn't have much in the way of a technical personality, but mostly I liked that his adventures kept happening. There were always more bad guys to kill and more good guys to save. New wars started even before the old ones were won. I hadn't read a real series like that since I was a kid, and it was exciting to live again in an infinite fiction.

Twenty pages from the end of Midnight Dawns, things started to look pretty bleak for Mayhem when he was shot seventeen times while attempting to rescue a (blond, American) hostage from the Enemy. But as a reader, I did not despair. The war effort would go on without him. There could —and would— be sequels starring his cohorts: Specialist Manny Loco and Private Jasper Jacks and the rest.

I was just about to the end when this little girl with barrette braids appeared in front of me and said, "What's in your nose?"

And I said, "Um, it's called a cannula. These tubes give me oxygen and help me breathe." Her mother swooped in and said, "Jackie," disapprovingly, but I said, "No, no, it's okay," because it totally was, and then Jackie asked, "Would they help me breathe, too?"

"I dunno. Let's try." I took it off and let Jackie stick the cannula in her nose and breathe.

"Tickles," she said.

"I know, right?"

"I think I'm breathing better," she said.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Well," I said, "I wish I could give you my cannula but I kind of really need the help." I already felt the loss. I focused on my breathing as Jackie handed the tubes back to me. I gave them a quick swipe with my T-shirt, laced the tubes behind my ears, and put the nubbins back in place.

"Thanks for letting me try it," she said.

"No problem."

"Jackie," her mother said again, and this time I let her go.

I returned to the book, where Staff Sergeant Max Mayhem was regretting that he had but one life to give for his country, but I kept thinking about that little kid, and how much I liked her.

The other thing about Beth, I guess, was that it could never again feel natural to talk to her. Any attempts to feign normal social interactions were just depressing because it was so glaringly obvious that everyone I spoke to for the rest of my life would feel awkward and self-conscious around me, except maybe kids like Jackie who just didn't know any better.

Anyway, I really did like being alone. I liked being alone with poor Staff Sergeant Max Mayhem, who —oh, come on, he's not going to survive these seventeen bullet wounds, is he?

(Spoiler alert: he lives.)

* * *

**One question: who would you like to be Caroline Mathers? Because I still have no idea.**

**Disclaimer: I don't own either Orphan Black or The Fault in our Stars. They are property of John Green and BBC America.**


End file.
